Diamond Tooth Taxidermy Blog:

Meet chichi, a pet preservation project I recently completed after about 7 painstaking months. I believe she is a Pyrrhura Conure breed, but will gladly accept corrections. Her human was quite distraught when she brought her to me, and spoke very little English to boot. What I could tell is that this bird wasn't in great shape. I know very little about the world of keeping birds as pets other than it's a high maintenance labor of love. These little bundles of love can develop all sorts of ailments, and it seemed this one had plucked out just about every feather within beak's reach. She was also in her early thirties so perhaps feathers fall out with age as well, I can't say. I am not even a novice, let alone an expert.

bald tail area

What I am is a passionate people and animal lover with an unparalleled work ethic. A shrewd business person would have turned this project away because the profit margin is basically nil after all the hours spent bringing the animal back to a presentable state, but once my heart takes over, my emptypockets are left to flap in the wind. I mounted the bird and put her aside for a few months while I worked on other pieces. All the while, she playfully glared at me, bald and pathetic. I scoured etsy, ebay and online taxidermy forums for feathers to no avail. The large colorful primary wing feathers seem easy to come by but what I really needed were the tiny green neck and belly feathers, among others.Then the universe does what it always does when I am patient with it, and while a client was dropping off her coyote recently she glanced over at Chichi and said, "oh, my parents have that same bird. It's always shedding. I'll see if they can hook you up". A week later a ziplock baggie full of all the feathers I need arrives in the mail. Perfection.

Here is her filled in belly and armpit, which were previously bald.

(before)

another bald tail shot:

Her one wing was very crudely clipped so I positioned her with that one tucked and the other outstretched, head cocked to the side in a playful way.

I realise that she isn't perfect, there is still some thinness of feathers on her head, but I poured all I had into this little girl who is so close in age to me, and this is what I got. I know how if feels to be a little rough around the edges but loved regardless.

I adore bridal commissions. I love ceremony, ritual, and acts if significance. Being entrusted to help dress a woman as she carries herself through these rites is an honor I will never take lightly.

M got married today. I can safely post these photos her commissioned piece. She basically gave me carte blanche; the only parameters were keeping her hairstyle in mind (a low chignon on the right side) and adding a nautical flair.I picked this bird with feathers that naturally curled up and away from its body, making a light and swirly shape that moved in the most fantastic way:

The mount itself was anchored to a steel band which can be visible or masked by hair, depending on style. I've yet to see how she wore it.

Some silk knot work, a subtle nod to the nautical locale at which the ceremony was being held. She was not interested in having a veil, per-se, but I snuck in some subtle antique netting. Provenance, baby.

Underside knot detail:

Inside lining. It felt gauche to stick a big old leather tag with my name on it inside her piece so I opted for one of my more discreet tags.

But wait! There's more! What about the mother of the bride?

This piece is sort of a reincarnation of an original I made for the same woman a few years back, and it suffered irreparable damage at the paws/mouth of M's dog. So behold Muriel Blingstar 2.0, this time in the form of a Polish Hen perched atop a felt wide brim hat.I think the Polish are my favorite chickens to work with, next to Silkies of course:

Of course she needs accessories.

I provided a ribbon option for securing the hat to her head. While its all attached quite nicely and discreetly, one can never predict how blustery those maritime afternoons can be. Heaven forbid another hat fly off and out of our lives.

Recently a very special person had a very special birthday and I wanted to mark the occasion with a one of a kind, thoughtful piece of art. So....how about a professionally blessed candle from the local occult shop nestled inside its own custom cow hoof holder?

I've been wanting to explore this shop for quite some time, as I am fascinated by all things occult but never really took the time to inform myself on it. I often feel tuned in with certain vibrations and know first hand that listening to my inner voice yields unique and perfectly tailored-to-me results, and for my own amusement have made up my own new-age sort of modus operandi for navigating my way through this world. It's a hodge podge of cherry picked bits and bobs I picked up from books, film, etc but feel too personal to really get into here- I'll save it for the Shrine post coming up shortly.

Digression aside what I'm trying to say is that I finally stopped into my local occult shop to check it out with my own eyeballs and get my paws on some "official" merchandise, most importantly a custom blessed candle for my friend.

I spoke to the practitioner and told him about S; he began to take notes on a piece of paper while I spoke and his enthusiasm was contagious. He was so excited about this candle! I didn't want to kill the mood by telling him he'd spelled her name wrong. I figured the intent was there and that's what really matters. He disappeared in the back for about fifteen minutes and emerged with this glittering hand painted candle. He proceeded to explain all the symbols on it to me- I know Aries is in there somewhere, plus a heart and something about water- but due to sensory overload I could only retain so much information. I was given strict instruction to pass onto my friend that she is to burn the candle at times when she feels she needs to meditate or clear her mind before making an important decision. This card he made is to stay underneath the candle while it is lit. After the entire thing has burned away, the card is then put into the flame and ignited as well.

I wanted to make it really special and put my own blend of magic into her gift. Hence the candle holder. She was born in the year of the Ox, so I used some cow hooves to make this piece since the two are so closely related. It's my first "double foot" holder, so to speak, and while I like the elegance of the tall, single foot holders with their long tapered candles, there is something raw about these two feet forever pushing and pulling one another that quite strikes my fancy.

And of course no piece of mine is complete without a little diamond somewhere!

Happy Birthday to anyone anytime anywhere. Today is the best day ever because it's the one we are living.

In light of some questions posed to me during and after a recent presentation at the Wagner Institute (post on that shortly) and Radio Times interview, I wanted to re post this lengthy and very heartfelt essay about dispatching my first rabbit and the subsequent meal I made from it. If anyone has any questions/concerns about how I navigate my way through a craft based around dead animals, please read this. While it isn't so taxidermy-centric, I believe that any type of consumption (food, clothing, media) is all connected and the more we know, the better we are.

Philadelphia's premiere rogue taxidermist gets schooled.

Meeting My Meat

Last weekend was an exhausting yet emotionally fulfilling one. I made the trek up to Schoharie to visit my beloved farm boys Thomas & Bailey by way of a short stay in Harlem with another dear friend while working a non taxidermy job in NYC. I arrived at the bus stop in Albany weary, bedraggled, and depressed and drained.The reason for my visit was not only pleasure, but purpose: the boys had been raising some rabbits for food and the time had come to process a few of them. Thomas, who was taking on this project, immediately thought of me as a viable processing partner, given my philosophy on eating meat. I won’t call myself a vegetarian ( I still occasionally eat meat when someone offers me a free meal and I would otherwise go hungry due to lack of funds, so call me a hypocrite if you wish) or any other label because whenever I try to talk about it, I just sound pretentious. Unfortunately, it mostly comes up when I’m declining an offer at a gathering where everyone else is partaking in the meal. It’s not like I want to stand up in a room full of folks enjoying themsselves and say, “well its just that you’re all eating shit meat”.But for the most part they are. And that isn’t the problem to me but more a symptom of something much, much more saddening.***And maybe this doesn’t apply to everyone but this is my journey and perhaps someday I will articulate it (through words or taxidermy) more clearly but it’s no coincidence that the craft about which I am most passionate revolves around the manipulation of skin onto forms, or why I gravitate towards the rogue genre of taxidermy. In this realm, I can take a skin and put it on a form that has nothing to do with the original specimen. I can give it wings, diamonds for eyes, a stretched neck, anything my mind comes up with. As someone who has struggled (to an agonizing degree) my entire life to achieve a healthy amount of comfort in my own skin, manipulating fantasy creatures out of the dermis of others is a projection of my own wishes to occasionally escape this body I currently occupy.It’s also no coincidence that underneath these hides are meat. Thick, bloody, nourishing meat. My journey as a budding taxidermist also led me down a path of exploring the source of my food, and the subsequent attempts to negotiate my ambivalent relationship with it. This has been a years long puzzle in which I occasionally fit in a flurry of pieces in one instant, or spend months trying to jam the same ill-fitting piece into a spot that won’t accept it. Sometimes I just have to walk away and come back when the time is right.Last weekend in New York, my food puzzle was ripe for some work and ready to accept a flurry of new pieces to their rightful home.Here is Thomas, watering their garden :They’ve got corn, tomatoes, pepper, squash, a wide variety of herbs and edible flowers plus many others that I am forgetting. It’s basically 99% edible though, and they are incorporating it into their daily meals. For example, here are some treats we harvested with which to make a salad dish for our Elizabethan Rabbit dish that evening:Even though my parents had a garden in our yard when I was a child, my knowledge of plants and how to grow food is so profoundly lacking. To actually see where the ingredients grow, how they are cared for, then pick them myself put some of those pieces back in the puzzle.Meet Meat and Tilda. Meat is just that; he’s to be processed sometime next year I believe. Tilda will stick around for some breeding. The boys know so much about breeds, and all the animals that they raise- they are fully invested in this life and it shows. They admit it will be difficult to say goodbye to Meat when the time comes but I think Thomas put it best when he said “I’ve nourished you your entire life, now it’s time for you to nourish me”. And how much more rich an experience to have touched that thick muscular tank of a creature and to have heard its delightful snorts while it was alive!It saddens me how much bacon is consumed every day, purchased thoughtlessly at some drive-thru window or convenience store and consumed in a car or subway en route to wherever the day is to be spent. I understand that most of us are in no position to raise our own food, and the majority of us need to rush somewhere to keep whatever shitty job is keeping our electric running, and this is the larger issue I was referring to earlier. We as a people appear to share this common need to multi-task and get everything done quickly and graduate from one spinning gerbil wheel (sorry for the cliché analogy but it fits!) to the next, never stopping to rest or be kind to ourselves because that type of behaviour simply is not encouraged. Working oneself to death is rewarded, taking a day to sleep and rest is frowned upon. Given this constant sense of urgency in everything all the time, it’s no surprise that food has become completely overprocessed and unrelateable to its origins. Eating. It’s just one more thing we have to do.***

Meat receives his daily cocktail bath massage.

I cannot stress enough how much of a difference it has made for me to see the full circle. I will never view dairy or meat products the same, especially after seeing the different ways in which farmers tend to their stock. If an animal is raised with love and respect, why shouldn’t it make sense that the meat it provides us will be better?Which brings me to the rabbits. Below is the big mamma rabbit who birthed the ones which will serve as meals. She’s a really darling, and we thanked her for her hard work.Now, the next few pictures after this are graphic, but no more so than any cooking website with a meat recipe. There is plenty of educational material out there on how to humanely kill and process a rabbit so I felt no need to further saturate the internet with my own images, but there are some meat and guts pictured so consider yourself warmed.After plenty of thought, discussion, and watching videos on the subject, we decided that severing the spine at the cervical vertebrae would be the safest and best bet. I felt more comfortable using my bare hands than some external device like a broom stick of which I could possibly lose control. So we each picked a rabbit, went to our designated spot, said a prayer of thanks and counted to three. Mine didn’t go so smoothly but we remained calm and it was over in a matter of seconds. My heart was pounding, my knees and arms felt weak and I had to crouch down to collect myself.Wow. I had just taken a life. I had just looked this creature in the eye, held it, stroked it, comforted it and then snapped it neck. And I wasn’t sorry. I wasn’t even crying, like I thought I would. Instead I felt surprisingly in touch with my surroundings and how I related to them.Look. I know that hunters dispatch animals all the time and every modern luxury I enjoy comes at the price of an animal’s life, one way or the other. I’m not trying to pile on any more significance to this event than my own personal amount, and certainly don’t want to be seen as the next hipster chick to fool herself into thinking she invented “farm to table”. So please don’t misinterpret my words for any more than what they are: a description of my experience, the very first time I embarked on paying the karmic price for my meal, as Georgia Pellegrini has said.Without wasting any time we hung them up and started processing. Here’s Thomas peeling the skin off his rabbit:Gutting: his went much more smoothly than mine, but I enjoyed the process regardless. There is an intense heat that comes off a creature once it has died; I noticed this the one time I purchased a freshly killed squab from the live poultry market and I could feel its heat burning through my bag and into my back as I rode home with it. This heat is even more concentrated inside the gut cavity and it was a bizarre and grotesque thrill to stick my hands in it and yanked out the heart.Thomas successfully removed his bladder- which is just beautiful -while I cut right through mine and wound up with a pee covered pair of bloody hands.The butchering, if you can call it that, (I feel like I’m insulting real butchers by calling the hack job we did by that name) took the better part of an hour. Clearly both Thomas and myself could benefit from some lessons. If only we each had our own reality shows where attempts at self betterment through education could be sponsored by some third-party….The rabbit chunks were tossed in flour and then lightly fried, and ultimately went into this wine-based stew mixture and cooked for three hours in Thomas’ new Le Creuset. Please check The Farmer’s Husband for full recipe and details.In honor of my visit, Bailey created an outstanding centerpiece for the dinner table. Mr. Pickles approves.All the photos I took of our three course meal came out blurry and dark, so I’m going to leave that coverage to the pros at The Farmer’s Husband. What I will say is that it was by far one of the best meals of my life, and along with the dazzling sensory experience of taste, smell and sight, there was also the sense of having earned this meal by getting my hands dirty and truly engaging myself in it. I felt so full that I had to undo the top button of my jeans but for the first time in my life I felt no shame associated with this fullness. Nary a hint of the words calories, exericize, weight, needing to justify this food or guilt reared its ugly head. I just felt nourished and content.And for me, that was the gap closing right where it needed to.The next morning I “helped” the boys with their chores by hovering about taking pictures. Here they are treating the pigs to some goat’s milk. I think the Lass was tickled mid milking and stomped her hoof in the bowl, warranting it pretty much unfit for human consumption. But just right for hungry piggies! Nothing is ever wasted on this farm and everything has a purpose.Even rumps double as pillows.Story time with the Littles.Life imitating art imitating life.Chicken city, rush hour.Sandals are a poor choice on a farm during chores but my feet survived. In other news, I would like for my hair to mimic the coloring/pattern of this chicken. Can anyone help me with this?That afternoon I boarded a bus back to NYC which connected to another bus to Philly which connected to another bus home. All the while in tow I had a mini-coolor with rabbit heads, pelts and feet for me and organs for my cats. They LOVE raw rabbit. I also had a generous amount of treats from the boys, clear eyes and a full heart.CAN’T LOSE.

*** It occurred to me I posted this that my sadness over mindless consumption transcends food, and is directly connected to waste. How many times have your pantyhose ripped and you just shrugged and threw them out, knowing you could just as easily replace them?I’ll just buy another.I have come to loathe those words. I’ve always had a disdain for waste, but my financial status as of late has forced me to put a very fine point on this. Waste is unacceptable. I cannot afford to throw anything out or damage my nice things so I handle my precious goods with care and find ways to use everything to the last drop. I’m talking about slicing open the moisturizer tube and scraping the inside to get one more dollop. I remember as a kid I thought it was so funny that my depression-era grandmother (who I’ve come to realise was never actually poor, she was just resourceful) would re-use her hosiery in so many creative ways: the elastic waist bands served to secure boxes of brownies, the material made into really cute puppets or even soap savers. Now I totally get it. This mentality of “just throwing it away and buying a new one” is why we have an entire industry built around “Field Destroying” (it’s so difficult to find info about this online but basically it’s when folks are paid to destroy any merchandise that is flawed or just plain undesirable instead or donating, or selling at a discount. It isn’t even permissible to toss these items in the garbage for fear of some filthy dumpster diver getting their dirty poor person paws on it. If this isn’t a the canary in the coal mine showing us how fucked up the retail/consumer system is, than my head is exploding for no reason.)There is no connection to where our goods come from. Even if it’s techno-wares, someone’s hands touched it. Someone made the packaging. Someone trucked it over to your corner store and stocked it on a shelf for you and I, the consumers. I really hope that when my clients take a piece of mine home, they treasure it and feel all the blood sweat and tears I poured into that item. Obviously, a custom taxidermy hat is much more involved and labor intensive than a bobby pin but please, next time you’re at the counter, handing over your paper or plastic to be swiped, run through your mind the series of events which brought this product to your possession, and acknowledge the extraordinary amount of coordination and teamwork that made it possible. Thanks for reading.

Back in January I received an email from a grieving woman about her dog whom had just passed away. I always get a pang in my heart upon opening these messages, along with a sense of urgency. In these cases, it's most likely an unexpected death and the person is unlikely to have the room or desire to accommodate a corpse in their freezer.

Meet Pumpkin:

Pumpkin was/is the dearly loved Chow/German Shepard mix rescue dog of a young woman who was absolutely heartbroken the day I met her. It's emotionally taxing to meet new people under these circumstances but rewarding just the same, in that I feel a sense of honor in being entrusted as a steward of sorts of the creature in which this human has poured so much emotion into. Also as someone who has struggled with vulnerability and allowing others to see me in that state, I feel a genuine sense of respect and compassion for the people coming to me in a state of grief. I've always been a highly sensitive and compassionate person and these moments are what remind me that we are all made one way or another for a reason.

As I'm sure you may have guessed, there are no off the shelf mannequin heads available for purchase in likeness of this specific dog breed. One feature in particular that would be important to recreate was the fleshy jowls and his goofy smile. My best bet was a carcass cast.

Here is the silicone mold I made using Pumpkin's head:

I cut it into two parts, took the head out, joined the halves back together into a container and poured the expanding foam inside. After peeling the silicone away I was left with a perfect cast of Pumpkin's head:

This would be the manikin for the mount. From there it was a matter of setting the eyes, making ear liners, adding clay to the right parts and getting the expression just right.

Thankfully I was provided with dozens of pictures as reference material and was able to recreate his happy, sort of silly and completely lovable expression fairly well. I'm especially happy with the eyes.

She wanted the hide tanned as a rug as well; this coat was too beautiful to let go:

I'm not sure what possessed me the other day but whilst completely on autopilot I made this dream catcher:

It's not unlike me to make dream-catchers, and I'm posting this on my site as well so potential clients have an idea about the scope of my skill set but this is so unlike the typical Diamond Tooth style that I'm not afraid to say I was possessed....

by Anne of Green Gables.

Does anyone else remember that series of books from childhood? I read them all. Anne was my hero. I admired her cool differences that set her apart from the typical prairie crowd, and her boyish toughness and confidence. I wanted to be like her so badly; I didn't even see that I already had my own cool differences and was indeed, quite tough. What I wound up projecting was an unsure and contrived version of a misfit when all I had to do was just be myself.

UGH adolescence. If you know someone in the throes of this truly bizarre stage of life or are going through it yourself, I would love to hug you and tell you that most adults (and other kids for that matter) are very stupid, brainwashed and insecure so just listen to your heart because it will get better...in 15 years. It's a long time to wait but trust me. You've got a long life to live.

So maybe I was channeling this longing I had to reconnect with this book series that held such prime real estate in my heart throughout my tweens and early teens and that's how I can explain the pink floral print fabric making up the bulk of this piece. The material itself is actually older than I know; it was passed onto me from the collection of my friend's grandmother when she passed some years ago. I took it, not ever really imagining myself making something with this...pink stuff...but feeling a soul tug just the same. My grandmother was a skilled seamstress and I love using her old pins and threads and trying to pick up on her energy from these objects.

Dream-catchers are such great opportunities for me to incorporate pieces from my found-on-the-street collection, like the crystal above (from a real antique chandelier) and this key. I like to imagine the history of these objects calling out to be combined with one another and I'm just blindly obeying their wishes. When a project comes completely out of autopilot like this one, it's hard for me to believe otherwise.

This skull was gifted to me from a friend who picked it up on a hike. Who knows how this doe lived and died? Humbly and anonymously, like most prairie-folk I imagine (OK I know I'm getting really cheesy).

I also incorporated some scraps of squirrel fur from one of my first attempts at taxidermy. I suppose subconsciously I was really trying to reconnect with my 12-year-old self...

It's weird, I remember thinking when I was a kid that being an adult would suck so much because all the gown-ups I met told me to "enjoy your childhood! Before you know it its gone!"

Despite all that heaping unsolicited advice, I still couldn't wait to be me, now. I'm finally the person I wanted to be for so long and it's like I knew this as a kid and felt nothing but angst for being stuck inside that kid body and mind. Did any of you feel that way?

I have a bag of vertebrae bones which were also a gift from a friend. These bones bear a particular significance to me since I had a piece of my back removed years ago to correct an issue with my spine. It still blows my mind that us humans can be opened up like rag dolls and have bits added and subtracted but that's a post for another time. Needless to say though, my back is a very important possession of mine, possibly my favorite one. Also my parents paid a shit ton of money for it. Thanks Mom and Dad!

Finally, no piece would be complete without a dose of chicken from my boys on the farm so here's a little tail feather for ya:

So who is this dream-catcher for? Do you know them? It's not for me, and I want it to find its rightful owner. This thing has powers and it will protect the right soul from nightmares. Please help me find them?

And just a FYI: I love making these. Custom orders would be graciously accepted.

Last weekend was an exhausting yet emotionally fulfilling one. I made the trek up to Schoharie to visit my beloved farm boys Thomas & Bailey by way of a short stay in Harlem with another dear friend while working a non taxidermy job in NYC. I arrived at the bus stop in Albany weary, bedraggled, and depressed and drained.

The reason for my visit was not only pleasure, but purpose: the boys had been raising some rabbits for food and the time had come to process a few of them. Thomas, who was taking on this project, immediately thought of me as a viable processing partner, given my philosophy on eating meat. I won't call myself a vegetarian ( I still occasionally eat meat when someone offers me a free meal and I would otherwise go hungry due to lack of funds, so call me a hypocrite if you wish) or any other label because whenever I try to talk about it, I just sound pretentious. Unfortunately, it mostly comes up when I'm declining an offer at a gathering where everyone else is partaking in the meal. It's not like I want to stand up in a room full of folks enjoying themsselves and say, "well its just that you're all eating shit meat".

But for the most part they are. And that isn't the problem to me but more a symptom of something much, much more saddening.***

And maybe this doesn't apply to everyone but this is my journey and perhaps someday I will articulate it (through words or taxidermy) more clearly but it's no coincidence that the craft about which I am most passionate revolves around the manipulation of skin onto forms, or why I gravitate towards the rogue genre of taxidermy. In this realm, I can take a skin and put it on a form that has nothing to do with the original specimen. I can give it wings, diamonds for eyes, a stretched neck, anything my mind comes up with. As someone who has struggled (to an agonizing degree) my entire life to achieve a healthy amount of comfort in my own skin, manipulating fantasy creatures out of the dermis of others is a projection of my own wishes to occasionally escape this body I currently occupy.

It's also no coincidence that underneath these hides are meat. Thick, bloody, nourishing meat. My journey as a budding taxidermist also led me down a path of exploring the source of my food, and the subsequent attempts to negotiate my ambivalent relationship with it. This has been a years long puzzle in which I occasionally fit in a flurry of pieces in one instant, or spend months trying to jam the same ill-fitting piece into a spot that won't accept it. Sometimes I just have to walk away and come back when the time is right.

Last weekend in New York, my food puzzle was ripe for some work and ready to accept a flurry of new pieces to their rightful home.

Here is Thomas, watering their garden :

They've got corn, tomatoes, pepper, squash, a wide variety of herbs and edible flowers plus many others that I am forgetting. It's basically 99% edible though, and they are incorporating it into their daily meals. For example, here are some treats we harvested with which to make a salad dish for our Elizabethan Rabbit dish that evening:

Even though my parents had a garden in our yard when I was a child, my knowledge of plants and how to grow food is so profoundly lacking. To actually see where the ingredients grow, how they are cared for, then pick them myself put some of those pieces back in the puzzle.

Meet Meat and Tilda. Meat is just that; he's to be processed sometime next year I believe. Tilda will stick around for some breeding. The boys know so much about breeds, and all the animals that they raise- they are fully invested in this life and it shows. They admit it will be difficult to say goodbye to Meat when the time comes but I think Thomas put it best when he said "I've nourished you your entire life, now it's time for you to nourish me". And how much more rich an experience to have touched that thick muscular tank of a creature and to have heard its delightful snorts while it was alive!

It saddens me how much bacon is consumed every day, purchased thoughtlessly at some drive-thru window or convenience store and consumed in a car or subway en route to wherever the day is to be spent. I understand that most of us are in no position to raise our own food, and the majority of us need to rush somewhere to keep whatever shitty job is keeping our electric running, and this is the larger issue I was referring to earlier. We as a people appear to share this common need to multi-task and get everything done quickly and graduate from one spinning gerbil wheel (sorry for the cliché analogy but it fits!) to the next, never stopping to rest or be kind to ourselves because that type of behaviour simply is not encouraged. Working oneself to death is rewarded, taking a day to sleep and rest is frowned upon. Given this constant sense of urgency in everything all the time, it's no surprise that food has become completely overprocessed and unrelateable to its origins. Eating. It's just one more thing we have to do.***

I cannot stress enough how much of a difference it has made for me to see the full circle. I will never view dairy or meat products the same, especially after seeing the different ways in which farmers tend to their stock. If an animal is raised with love and respect, why shouldn't it make sense that the meat it provides us will be better?

Which brings me to the rabbits. Below is the big mamma rabbit who birthed the ones which will serve as meals. She's a really darling, and we thanked her for her hard work.

Now, the next few pictures after this are graphic, but no more so than any cooking website with a meat recipe. There is plenty of educational material out there on how to humanely kill and process a rabbit so I felt no need to further saturate the internet with my own images, but there are some meat and guts pictured so consider yourself warmed.

After plenty of thought, discussion, and watching videos on the subject, we decided that severing the spine at the cervical vertebrae would be the safest and best bet. I felt more comfortable using my bare hands than some external device like a broom stick of which I could possibly lose control. So we each picked a rabbit, went to our designated spot, said a prayer of thanks and counted to three. Mine didn't go so smoothly but we remained calm and it was over in a matter of seconds. My heart was pounding, my knees and arms felt weak and I had to crouch down to collect myself.

Wow. I had just taken a life. I had just looked this creature in the eye, held it, stroked it, comforted it and then snapped it neck. And I wasn't sorry. I wasn't even crying, like I thought I would. Instead I felt surprisingly in touch with my surroundings and how I related to them.

Look. I know that hunters dispatch animals all the time and every modern luxury I enjoy comes at the price of an animal's life, one way or the other. I'm not trying to pile on any more significance to this event than my own personal amount, and certainly don't want to be seen as the next hipster chick to fool herself into thinking she invented "farm to table". So please don't misinterpret my words for any more than what they are: a description of my experience, the very first time I embarked on paying the karmic price for my meal, as Georgia Pellegrini has said.

Without wasting any time we hung them up and started processing. Here's Thomas peeling the skin off his rabbit:

Gutting: his went much more smoothly than mine, but I enjoyed the process regardless. There is an intense heat that comes off a creature once it has died; I noticed this the one time I purchased a freshly killed squab from the live poultry market and I could feel its heat burning through my bag and into my back as I rode home with it. This heat is even more concentrated inside the gut cavity and it was a bizarre and grotesque thrill to stick my hands in it and yanked out the heart.

Thomas successfully removed his bladder- which is just beautiful -while I cut right through mine and wound up with a pee covered pair of bloody hands.

The butchering, if you can call it that, (I feel like I'm insulting real butchers by calling the hack job we did by that name) took the better part of an hour. Clearly both Thomas and myself could benefit from some lessons. If only we each had our own reality shows where attempts at self betterment through education could be sponsored by some third-party....

The rabbit chunks were tossed in flour and then lightly fried, and ultimately went into this wine-based stew mixture and cooked for three hours in Thomas' new Le Creuset. Please check The Farmer's Husband for full recipe and details.

In honor of my visit, Bailey created an outstanding centerpiece for the dinner table. Mr. Pickles approves.

All the photos I took of our three course meal came out blurry and dark, so I'm going to leave that coverage to the pros at The Farmer's Husband. What I will say is that it was by far one of the best meals of my life, and along with the dazzling sensory experience of taste, smell and sight, there was also the sense of having earned this meal by getting my hands dirty and truly engaging myself in it. I felt so full that I had to undo the top button of my jeans but for the first time in my life I felt no shame associated with this fullness. Nary a hint of the words calories, exericize, weight, needing to justify this food or guilt reared its ugly head. I just felt nourished and content.

And for me, that was the gap closing right where it needed to.

The next morning I "helped" the boys with their chores by hovering about taking pictures. Here they are treating the pigs to some goat's milk. I think the Lass was tickled mid milking and stomped her hoof in the bowl, warranting it pretty much unfit for human consumption. But just right for hungry piggies! Nothing is ever wasted on this farm and everything has a purpose.

Even rumps double as pillows.

Story time with the Littles.

Life imitating art imitating life.

Chicken city, rush hour.

Sandals are a poor choice on a farm during chores but my feet survived. In other news, I would like for my hair to mimic the coloring/pattern of this chicken. Can anyone help me with this?

That afternoon I boarded a bus back to NYC which connected to another bus to Philly which connected to another bus home. All the while in tow I had a mini-coolor with rabbit heads, pelts and feet for me and organs for my cats. They LOVE raw rabbit. I also had a generous amount of treats from the boys, clear eyes and a full heart.

CAN'T LOSE.

*** It occurred to me I posted this that my sadness over mindless consumption transcends food, and is directly connected to waste. How many times have your pantyhose ripped and you just shrugged and threw them out, knowing you could just as easily replace them?

I'll just buy another.

I have come to loathe those words. I've always had a disdain for waste, but my financial status as of late has forced me to put a very fine point on this. Waste is unacceptable. I cannot afford to throw anything out or damage my nice things so I handle my precious goods with care and find ways to use everything to the last drop. I'm talking about slicing open the moisturizer tube and scraping the inside to get one more dollop. I remember as a kid I thought it was so funny that my depression-era grandmother (who I've come to realise was never actually poor, she was just resourceful) would re-use her hosiery in so many creative ways: the elastic waist bands served to secure boxes of brownies, the material made into really cute puppets or even soap savers. Now I totally get it. This mentality of "just throwing it away and buying a new one" is why we have an entire industry built around "Field Destroying" (it's so difficult to find info about this online but basically it's when folks are paid to destroy any merchandise that is flawed or just plain undesirable instead or donating, or selling at a discount. It isn't even permissible to toss these items in the garbage for fear of some filthy dumpster diver getting their dirty poor person paws on it. If this isn't a the canary in the coal mine showing us how fucked up the retail/consumer system is, than my head is exploding for no reason.)

There is no connection to where our goods come from. Even if it's techno-wares, someone's hands touched it. Someone made the packaging. Someone trucked it over to your corner store and stocked it on a shelf for you and I, the consumers. I really hope that when my clients take a piece of mine home, they treasure it and feel all the blood sweat and tears I poured into that item. Obviously, a custom taxidermy hat is much more involved and labor intensive than a bobby pin but please, next time you're at the counter, handing over your paper or plastic to be swiped, run through your mind the series of events which brought this product to your possession, and acknowledge the extraordinary amount of coordination and teamwork that made it possible. Thanks for reading.

If you're in Philly and planning your wedding, perhaps you already have leafed through the pages this most recent issue of Philadelphia Wedding Magazine with a mug under your face to catch the inevitable drool. There are some gorgeous pieces in there. Diamond Tooth had the honor of being featured as an Editor's Pick and they included my treasured Blue Quail Puff Fascinator in their bridal shoot.

I really do have a mega soft spot for weddings sometimes I fantasize about having mine over and over again just so I could wear every type of dress that struck my fancy. Seeing as that plays out much better in my fantasies where logic need not apply, I'm just as thrilled to work with brides-to-be on their head adornment fantasy. Just knowing that a piece which I have poured so much love into can be an integral part of someone's very important day makes my heart swell.

In fact, this Blue Quail Puff made an appearance at a real life wedding in Philadelphia recently:

Such a handsome couple!

So ladies, if you're floating down the aisle any tim esoon, please peruse the Diamond Tooth Bridal page for ready-to-wear pieces as well as inspiration for any custom head piece you can dream up.

Just a few shots of whats brewing at Diamond Tooth: All these claws are future talon charms and should be available for sale shortly. Say I love you for Valentine's day while flipping Hallmark the bird.

This was going to be an add-on to the last post, but Minky deserves a post all of his own. Please read:

And on a sad note, those of you (hi honey! mom, dad?) who have read this blog from it's humble beginnings exactly one year ago may remember Minky, my kindred spirit who made my quite lonely stay in teh poconos so much more enjoyable, if not magical. During my stay I loved that cat like he was my own and we forged an irreplaceable bond. Just minutes ago news reached me of Minky's passing. His two dads loved him dearly and he is buried by the stream just outside the house where I stayed with him. He loved to go out and sniff at that stream. Below are a couple photos of dear old Minks and some links to posts pertaining to him.